


All the World's a Stage

by cornerandchair



Category: Trollhunters (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-01
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-09-27 18:01:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10037411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cornerandchair/pseuds/cornerandchair
Summary: Claire loved the theater. She loved Shakespeare.And there's no play more famous than Romeo and Juliet.So she had to be in it, and she needed to find her perfect Romeo.Just so happened that Jim might've been that perfect Romeo, but Jim also seemed to be dealing with a Shakespeare-esqe problem of his own.





	

It wasn’t hard to say that Claire loved the theater. She loved Shakespeare. She loved _art_.

She lived for theater. It was her escapism from studies, her parents and baby brother Enrique. She loved all that but sometimes you just had to get away. In a way she felt like the theater gave her a connection to something bigger, something older, a deeper heritage that she could connect to along with her familial heritage.

Her school was finally putting on a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, not her favorite. The leads die in the end, after all. But still, it was a good production to start with. She knew she had to be Juliet, she just needed a good Romeo.

And she thought she’d found one in Jim.

He was shy, and a bit of a mess, but he was different too. A lot better than Steve, anyway. No offence to Steve- she just wasn’t really into him.

She thought she was lucky when Jim showed up at the last minute wearing that strange armor he apparently made himself. He made a great Romeo, and even had an amazing stage presence reciting that original piece!

Ecstatic was too soft a word.

She held her script to her chest one night. Deep in thought about her life. All her hopes for this school year were riding on this play, her escapism needed to be perfect.

And then her escapism started getting stressful when Jim kept not showing up. Steve stepped in as Romeo, but he felt more like a Tybalt. 

Things just got worse from there. Jim _trashed_ her house, and her parents ground her. That letter from Jim about the monsters. Everything just seemed so weird, he played off the letter, but something was definitely weird.

It was like a mystery, like she’d stumbled into a weird version of a Shakespeare play or a fantasy novel. Nothing added up, and surely somewhere an unseen audience was either laughing or pulling their hair out over her inability to figure it out.

All the world’s a stage,  
And all the men and women merely players.

The mystery was too good to ignore. Especially after her investigation just ended up with her back in her house with a major headache and fuzzy memories of what happened that she almost wrote off as a weird dream. Mr. Strickler and Jim… There was something weird about them. And what was a Draal?

Or- _or_ Jim was just crazy. And she was crazy for believing any of this. That what she was feeling when he came in through her bedroom window. But she was glad she believed him, she was glad she ran out into the dark forest. 

Jim would have died protecting her.

He’d never seemed more like Romeo than in that moment, and she was going to keep him alive no matter what. She knew she was risking a lot going to get her parents, another grounding, a lecture, anything. She would take it to save him.

Thankfully a quick and easy lie later and they even let her stay in the hospital with him. She stayed as long as she could. At some point she began rehearsing her lines

“By and by, I come:--  
To cease thy suit, and leave me to my grief,  
To-morrow I will send.”

Jim twitched, his heart beat raising slightly. His voice came out, soft and breathy. “So… thrive my soul--.”

She gasped. Then continued: “A thousand times goodnight!”

“A… thousand times the worse… to… thy light.  
Love… toward love… as schoolboys-”  
He coughed, cutting his recitation short.

She took his hand, holding it tightly. "It's okay, Jim. I understand."

If all the world was a stage, Jim had been acting multiple parts at the same time for longer than anyone should. It was no wonder he was a mess.

Claire stayed by his side until visiting hours were over. This was the ending of an act, and she was brimming with a sort of excited nervousness towards what was to come. She had so many questions, so many new things to learn. She wanted to learn about everything, and move forward to help Jim in whatever he was doing.

What Claire forgot was that Shakespeare wrote his dramas in five acts.  
Things always got **_worse_** before they got better, and that was if things got better at all.


End file.
